Movie Review: 'Art & Copy'

Movie Review: 'Art & Copy'

Article excerpt

Long before "Mad Men," the advertising profession occupied a
special, not very desirable place in the American consciousness.
"Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1957) and the sublime "Lover Come
Back" (1962) raked the industry over the coals. For a later, hipper
audience, "Putney Swope" (1969) and "How to Get Ahead in
Advertising" (1989) did the same - but with New... Improved...
Rakes! and Hotter... 50 percent Brighter... Coals! Films like "12
Angry Men" (1957) and "Joe" (1970) used this professional
designation as a shorthand for capitalism at its slickest and
shallowest. Even Cary Grant's Roger O. Thornhill (the "O" stands for
"nothing," he quips) in "North by Northwest" is besmirched with the
label: He may be a charmer, but he's also (at the start) as slick
and shallow as the rest. So maybe it's time to look at the positive
side of an industry that - Doug Pray tells us in his new documentary
"Art & Copy" - is projected to be doing half a trillion dollars'
worth of annual business by 2010. Pray barely gives us any pre-
1960s history, skipping from cave drawings in the first scene to the
current day Wieden & Kennedy firm in the second. He's only concerned
with the past 4-1/2 decades, during which, he proposes, a number of
particularly talented figures from the creative side of the old
agencies broke away and revolutionized the business. The film
contains all or part of some of the most indelible concepts of the
period, from the luggage tossed into a gorilla's cage and "I can't
believe I ate the whole thing!" to "I _ New York" and Nike's "Just
do it." (The last, it is revealed, was inspired by Gary Gilmore's
exhortation "Let's do it!" to his executioners.) For those of a
certain age, there is plenty of nostalgic pleasure: Apple's "1984"
spot (directed by Ridley Scott) still impresses; the 1994 Aaron Burr
"Got Milk?" ad remains funnier, second for second, than any comedy
out of Hollywood in living memory, and more memorable on the whole
than anything its director, Michael Bay ("Transformers," "Pearl
Harbor"), has made since. …